creepingnet
Veteran Member
With the Car stuff done, now it's time to focus on vintage computers again.
Selling my Mac SE FDHD, not sure what method I'm using. I just don't have a need for it anymore, being as I have Mac emulation in DOS now (in color) and I'm not that nostalgic for old Mac stuff anyway.
Most of my experiments though have been finding ways to get WSS supported in more DOS Games since it seems in the past few years more people are going towards vintage laptops for gaming and audio, and there's this whole pool of late DX2, DX4, and early Pentium laptops that used WIndows Sound System compatible chips, in particular the catankerous Crystal CS-4231 series chips which are so wacky it's sometimes a gamble that something that supports WSS in DOS will actually work with it.
On my website I've got a bigger document on this going up but so far, I've done the following...
Imported over *.DIG DIGPAK files from various other DOS games into one that can support those drivers. One game I did this with was Destruction Derby and it works perfectly this way. Still messing with The Need for Speed to get this working.
Found out MAME 0.90 has WSS Support (albeit it runs very slow on my DX4/75 M/75 laptop with that enabled).
Did an experiment with MICROSOF.DRV from LSL6 into LSL5, that did not work that well.
Managed to import in some configuration data from Blood & Magic into Abuse to get full WSS support in Abuse.
Put the 1.30 upgrade onto The 7th Guest but ran into an issue getting SNDSYS.COM to find the device because for some weird rreason the Crystal CS-4231-KQ chip does not have an actual IRQ it's tethered to. Using -1 which most DIGPAK driver using audio engines use cause T7G to launch, then exit before even getting to the welcome screen.
Also going to figure out how to get WSSXLAT to work properly as well for stuff that's not WSS Compatible. Right now I can't get it to recognize the CS4231 at all, maybe that IRQ issue is a clue. I find setting IRQ to 7 works for WSS enabled products but seems that I get no sound from the chip in SBCOMPAT mode.
Another future experiment, since I have an extra Versa M/75 motherboard and CPU board sitting around, will be to try out the CS-4231A pin compatible chip as an upgrade from the original CS-4231-KQ to the more feature heavy "A" model. The Datasheet for the 4231A says it has a SB Emulation mode and strangely enough mentions an FM Synthesizer built into the chip. If this goes well enough, it might be worth purchasing these 4231A chips to add Adlib and more reliable SB Compatibility to these older WSS Compatible laptops. But we'll see.
I'm also looking into building or finding a PCMCIA breadboard type card for developing my own card. I have an idea for two cards, one is a pure Adlib card for stuff like the Versa that have no OPL, or older laptops that would be running merely games designed for Adlib. The second would use the ESS688 and a Adlib chip. I looked at the ESS688 datasheet as well and it looks doable. My goal is to also adopt the feature from the Panasonic CF-VEW cards that passes audio through the internal speaker so it's a seamless solution. Basically, on my VERSA, the card would be hidden inside the PCMCIA slots, and if I wanted audio output through headphones, I think I"ve found a way to put an audio jack on there and have it work without a dongle, as well as a volume roller.
Selling my Mac SE FDHD, not sure what method I'm using. I just don't have a need for it anymore, being as I have Mac emulation in DOS now (in color) and I'm not that nostalgic for old Mac stuff anyway.
Most of my experiments though have been finding ways to get WSS supported in more DOS Games since it seems in the past few years more people are going towards vintage laptops for gaming and audio, and there's this whole pool of late DX2, DX4, and early Pentium laptops that used WIndows Sound System compatible chips, in particular the catankerous Crystal CS-4231 series chips which are so wacky it's sometimes a gamble that something that supports WSS in DOS will actually work with it.
On my website I've got a bigger document on this going up but so far, I've done the following...
Imported over *.DIG DIGPAK files from various other DOS games into one that can support those drivers. One game I did this with was Destruction Derby and it works perfectly this way. Still messing with The Need for Speed to get this working.
Found out MAME 0.90 has WSS Support (albeit it runs very slow on my DX4/75 M/75 laptop with that enabled).
Did an experiment with MICROSOF.DRV from LSL6 into LSL5, that did not work that well.
Managed to import in some configuration data from Blood & Magic into Abuse to get full WSS support in Abuse.
Put the 1.30 upgrade onto The 7th Guest but ran into an issue getting SNDSYS.COM to find the device because for some weird rreason the Crystal CS-4231-KQ chip does not have an actual IRQ it's tethered to. Using -1 which most DIGPAK driver using audio engines use cause T7G to launch, then exit before even getting to the welcome screen.
Also going to figure out how to get WSSXLAT to work properly as well for stuff that's not WSS Compatible. Right now I can't get it to recognize the CS4231 at all, maybe that IRQ issue is a clue. I find setting IRQ to 7 works for WSS enabled products but seems that I get no sound from the chip in SBCOMPAT mode.
Another future experiment, since I have an extra Versa M/75 motherboard and CPU board sitting around, will be to try out the CS-4231A pin compatible chip as an upgrade from the original CS-4231-KQ to the more feature heavy "A" model. The Datasheet for the 4231A says it has a SB Emulation mode and strangely enough mentions an FM Synthesizer built into the chip. If this goes well enough, it might be worth purchasing these 4231A chips to add Adlib and more reliable SB Compatibility to these older WSS Compatible laptops. But we'll see.
I'm also looking into building or finding a PCMCIA breadboard type card for developing my own card. I have an idea for two cards, one is a pure Adlib card for stuff like the Versa that have no OPL, or older laptops that would be running merely games designed for Adlib. The second would use the ESS688 and a Adlib chip. I looked at the ESS688 datasheet as well and it looks doable. My goal is to also adopt the feature from the Panasonic CF-VEW cards that passes audio through the internal speaker so it's a seamless solution. Basically, on my VERSA, the card would be hidden inside the PCMCIA slots, and if I wanted audio output through headphones, I think I"ve found a way to put an audio jack on there and have it work without a dongle, as well as a volume roller.